SmokeSound

It has been a long while since I last sat at the computer to write a blog entry.  Since then, my innards have been engaged with invaders bent on clearing space for themselves.  At first, I thought it was food poisoning, but it is probably just a cosmic system of justice finally turning its attention to me. A week or two ago, I returned to bed in the middle of the night, knowing that there could not possibly be any liquid left in my system.  "People die when that happens," I said to myself.  Then I said, "To hell with it!  I am too tired to care." "This is not what it is like to die," I thought:  "This is  dying.  This is how it happens." So far, I have survived, and in pretty good shape for an old, dehydrated codger.  So, this morning, I drove across town to watch the TOTs play baseball; those old guys who start out toward first base wondering whether they will make it, who know that if they don't, they will have given it everything

Here are two curious facts: 1) 90% of Americans believe that sex extramarital sex is almost always a serious moral flaw.  In fact, about half of the States in the Union have severe penalties for married people who engage in extramarital sex.  At the same time, other surveys show that at least a majority of people do it. 2)  90% of Americans list tax evasion as a serious social moral flaw.  At the same time, a flood of radio and TV ads by lawyers offer to help people who owe the government thousands of dollars:  "After all," the ads say, "it is your money!"  And our recent history is a recitation of how much people despise government. I cannot recall what the next most serious moral flaws were, but they trailed badly, and may have had to do with selling used cars. It is easier for me to believe that 90% of people disapprove of marital infidelity.  After all, it is undoubtedly the fact that in most marriages, there are children to be raised, and whatever else

Jao loves "cahz":  truck cars, car cars, school bus cars; and most of all he loves cahz with buttons. The other day he had three cahz lined up, side-by-side, each with three buttons on the roof, and had discovered that he could play a medley of emergency sounds:  every loud get-the-hell-out-of-our-way sound ever invented by a toy manufacturer.  "Twenty-seven!", he tried to say, but could not.  "Twenty-seven different combinations of shrieks, howls, and wails!" More, if you add the buttons on the dishwasher.  It is rare that the dishwasher finishes its routines with the same intentions with which it began. And, of course, he has not calculated the permutations and possibilities if he were not  to push one of the buttons.  That has never occurred to him.  He has never considered not pushing a button. 

Once, when the world was young, we lived in a rather large brick house in a rather small town in northeast Iowa.  There was a fireplace in the living room.  When it got cold, outside and in-, we sometimes started a fire in the fireplace.  It was a way to try to warm the outside by pumping slightly warmer air up the chimney. Early on in our life there, we took out the fireplace and installed a new, large wood stove.  It is, I know, still doing winter duty, creating a warm spot in the world when the wind howls outside, and when the last thermal unit of heat has gone looking for refuge. Midwest winters are not all about crystalline mornings and moonglow vistas.  They are about dying in the cold.  Huffington Post reports that, right now, with Polar air tumbling down over Canada to the Upper Midwest, there are 100,000 people without electricity in Canada.  There will be thousands more, all the way to wherever the sea begins.  It might be that most of them do not depend on electricity